[ryani]

After listening to Mike Duncan's excellent "History of Rome" podcast, one of the repeated themes I noticed is that during periods when the Romans were more racist/classist/etc they had trouble. Their periods of greatest success were when they let people with the necessary skills and talent rise to the top regardless of their origin.

That said, they definitely had problems with failing to culturally assimilate immigrants during the late empire -- when "citizens" of the empire didn't think of themselves as Roman but instead primarily part of some other group.

[sb057]

>during periods when the Romans were more racist/classist/etc they had trouble

I'm afraid you might be attributing some false causality. It seems more obvious to me that during periods of peace, any social rifts are unproblematic, but when people start to go hungry and their wealth is threatened, any societal wedges are utilized by the domineering group to protect their interests.

[shadowofneptune]

It does become an issue when the only competent administrators of Rome were Germanic in origin and discriminated against, or when the army's best men are also Germanic. A massacre of the families of german soldiers both alienated the king of the Vandals and strengthened his position, leading eventually to the Sack of Rome. Duncan asks near the end of the show why there was not a series of German emperors, as there were Dalmatian emperors.

[cheaprentalyeti]

Technically there were a bunch of German "emperors" although they called themselves kings. They're the people that Justinian fought against, more or less, when he reconquered Italy and in the process killed large parts of the population.

I'll have to double-check Duncan's podcast to see if he ends it in the 470s or in the 530s or so. Personally I think the Gothic War/Lombard Invasion makes a much better ending point for civilization in the West than 472.

[thaumasiotes]

> there were a bunch of German "emperors" although they called themselves kings.

What does that mean? "King" was the word for the concept in every language except Latin, where it was still the word for the concept, but was avoided due to a cultural taboo.

A Roman emperor held many titles. English "emperor" derives from imperator, "commander", an honorific title given to generals. He was addressed as Caesar, originally a personal name, which survives in the German Kaiser and the Russian Tsar. To the Greeks, he was basileus, "king", because there was no Greek taboo on the word "king".

There was no title analogous to Near Eastern "king of kings" or Chinese 皇帝, explicitly set above the level of a "king".

[User23]

For some reason introductory history doesn’t much cover the Visigothic Roman Kingdom, but it’s quite interesting. L. Sprague de Camp set his marvelous Lest Darkness Fall in that time period.

[namdnay]

I sometimes feel like I’m the only one to not be a huge fan of The History Of Rome. It wasn’t bad, but I got frustrated with the fact that it was too much of “A biography of Roman leaders”: not enough analysis of the more fundamental shifts happening behind the scenes, not enough time spent discussing what was life was actually like for the various populations at different times. There were a few “step back” episodes, but they were few and far between

There, I’ve got it off my chest. You can start throwing stones now ;)

[boomboomsubban]

Unfortunately the historical record lacks the information to provide a meaningful analysis of many of those people behind the scenes. Only the nobles were writing books, and the emperors only kept the ones flattering them.

Most popular accounts of more behind the scenes actions extrapolate heavily from minimal information. We actually have very little idea how Roman soldiers of various eras fought for example, descriptions of battles rarely describe the individual soldiers actions during combat.

I'm sure Duncan would have liked to do more about the people, Revolutions often tries to describe the lives of the multiple different sides.

[waflhead]

Consider the Life of Caesar podcast. They're covering the period starting from Julius Caesar and after 6 years and hundreds of hours they're only up to Nero.

[thrower123]

I couldn't get into that podcast. I just don't like Duncan's voice.

[rebuilder]

Perhaps, but for me, the lazy takeaway was that the (west) Romans continuously struggled with the wealth/power feedback loop and eventually tore themselves apart because their state could not reign over its wealthiest members.

[inglor_cz]

Roman civilization worked well assimilating other people who were actually willing to assimilate. But that is a fairly non-consequential observation, at least when observed in 2021, and the mechanism cannot be easily carried over to modern world.

For starters, there is a lot more of us humans nowadays. Instant communication means that even if you move thousands of miles away from your country, you are still fed a steady information diet about all the outrage back home, so you cannot really let go of the place you moved away from.

And some culture clashes are very real. The later remnant of the Roman empire (Byzantium) fought against the Islamic world for centuries and finally fell to the Turks. They did not find a way to assimilate the newcomers. The religious barrier was too high. To be fair, they had a similar problem with Catholic Europeans, the Sack of Constantinople wasn't perpetrated by anyone else than fellow Christians.

In modern Western Europe, some immigrant groups assimilate fairly quickly (Russians, Indians, Vietnamese, Iranians), some other form parallel societies in a manner that Rome would not have tolerated well.

[cabalamat]

> Roman civilization worked well assimilating other people who were actually willing to assimilate

I don't think it's historically accurate to describe the Germanic peoples who conquered the Western Roman Empire as not willing to assimilate, given that they all learned Latin (and indeed their descendants in Italy, France and Spain speak languages descended from Latin to this day) and converted to Christianity. They clearly were prepared to take up Roman ways/culture.

[hkt]

> In modern Western Europe, some immigrant groups assimilate fairly quickly (Russians, Indians, Vietnamese, Iranians), some other form parallel societies in a manner that Rome would not have tolerated well.

Like most sweeping generalisations, this is wrong. Whether groups live in parallel is determined community by community, not by nationality. I can think of examples of less integrated Vietnamese communities in the UK and more integrated Pakistani communities, and vice versa. What can't be ignored is the level of racism groups are subjected to: it seems obvious to say that people will integrate better if they have people willing to integrate with them. I suspect this is far more often the problem.

[cabalamat]

> I can think of examples of less integrated Vietnamese communities in the UK and more integrated Pakistani communities, and vice versa. What can't be ignored is the level of racism groups are subjected to: it seems obvious to say that people will integrate better if they have people willing to integrate with them.

It's not all obvious to me that:

(1) some Vietnamese and Pakistani communities in the UK faced more racism than other Vietnamese and Pakistani communities in other parts of the UK,

and (2) that was the cause of the different amounts of integration between those communities.

Do you have any data to back up this contention?

[inglor_cz]

Not the OP, just a comment.

My 1990s experience says that a lot of people are casually racist, sometimes viciously so, but, at the same time, they are perfectly willing to engage in mutual commerce and other activites with the outgroup, as long as they gain something from it. If this hypocritical kind of racism dominates, the outgroup has a chance to establish itself through education and trade.

The "Kauft nicht bei den Juden" or KKK-like kind of racism that really strives to isolate and possibly exterminate the outgroup even at a financial or practical cost to the dominant group is rarer and if it prevails, it leads to really bad consequences.

[TMWNN]

>My 1990s experience says that a lot of people are casually racist, sometimes viciously so, but, at the same time, they are perfectly willing to engage in mutual commerce and other activites with the outgroup, as long as they gain something from it. If this hypocritical kind of racism dominates, the outgroup has a chance to establish itself through education and trade.

I don't think this is hypocritical; just normal human behavior.

Newcomers are always the "other", and treated as such. Over time, as the "in group" discovers that if the "out group" displays behavior that makes for good customers and employees, and that there are financial benefits (increased sales, being able to hire new staff at a lower rate than otherwise) the "out group" becomes integrated with the "in group".

>The "Kauft nicht bei den Juden" or KKK-like kind of racism that really strives to isolate and possibly exterminate the outgroup even at a financial or practical cost to the dominant group is rarer and if it prevails, it leads to really bad consequences.

Yes, but thankfully such behavior is (very) rare. Anti-Semitism has existed in Europe for centuries but conditions had gradually improved everywhere. When fascism/authoritarianism became a thing in Europe in the first half of the 20th century, most regimes at worst maintained the existing casual anti-Semitism. Hitlerian genocidal anti-Semitism was very much an aberration, not seen in Hungary, pre-Anschluss Austria, Poland, or Italy. Mussolini's Italy had many Jewish supporters and leaders; it reluctantly implemented anti-Jewish racial laws just before the war began, after it became clear that Germany was now the more powerful Axis power.

More to the point, the integration can only occur when the "out group" behaves in ways that the "in group" accepts. In the US and Western Europe such integration happened or is happening with Jews, Italians, Irish, Eastern Europeans, Asians, South non-Muslim Asians, and Latinos. This has not happened with blacks and Muslims.

[selimthegrim]

What's your proof that Muslims in the US are resisting integration?

[TMWNN]

>What can't be ignored is the level of racism groups are subjected to: it seems obvious to say that people will integrate better if they have people willing to integrate with them. I suspect this is far more often the problem.

I disagree. In Britain you have three groups from the Indian subcontinent:

* Indian Hindus

* Indian Sikhs

* Indian and Pakistani Muslims

Sikhs and Hindus have been very successful; they are more likely than the average to be part of the British middle class (<http://www.theguardian.com/money/2010/dec/14/middle-britain-...>). Muslims are, by contrast, worse than average in every single social measure despite being, racially speaking, indistinguishable from the other two groups to any outsider (since none knows, or cares, about the myriad of caste differences); they are all "Asians" in Britain.

Indian Sikhs and Hindus are willing to assimilate. Indian and Pakistani Muslims, far less so.

[inglor_cz]

"What can't be ignored is the level of racism groups are subjected to: it seems obvious to say that people will integrate better if they have people willing to integrate with them. I suspect this is far more often the problem."

It does not seem as obvious to me. This theory seems to have too many outliers.

At least here in Central Europe, racism/anti-semitism against visible minorities tended to be very strong. Historically, Jews were treated horribly, and in the more recent history, Vietnamese also. Growing up in the 1990s, there was a lot of shockingly casual racism against them.

Looking across the pond, Japanese-Americans were herded into concentration camps during WWII. The only worse level of racism is probably genocide.

In all these cases, the communities are now very well integrated, though the memories of really bad treatment aren't that distant.

[wffurr]

Did you read the article at all?

[inglor_cz]

Yes, yesterday, actually. I love the blog, though I do not always agree with everything. For example, this particular text could have remarked that Christianity turned out to be notably less assimilable and co-optable than many other identities and actually managed to subvert the empire instead of being absorbed to the mega-mix.

[labster]

No, it could not have made that point, because Christianity did not happen during the Roman Republic. It was not about the empire at all, so why would it make any points about the empire?

[inglor_cz]

Because it was a successor state with a rather similar philosophy when it came to conquering tribes and nations around?